The Day the Good Internet Died - The Ringer

A rant down memory lane to comment on "the duality of the internet these days... worse and better than ever, growing tackier as it strives for bespoke, hosting information so limitless that you can’t find any of it... no longer primarily a furtive escape ... It’s just where everyone always is: my parents, my job, my frenemies ... it lasts forever & never forgets ... [but also] an almost unbearable ... decay: broken links, abandoned blogs... things I know I’ve read somewhere and want to quote ... but just can’t seem to resurface the same way I used to...

[when] Google Reader disappeared in 2013,... a sign of the crumbling of... the Good Internet", of which the blogosphere was backbone... "stubbornly decentralized yet also collaborative".

But did shuttering Reader kill blogging, or was blogging dying anyway? "the medium continued to lose people and places" to hosting & social platforms. "It makes sense to create content in the same place you consume it. Why futz around with a separate blog when you can just post stuff on Facebook and Snapchat? ,,, am I just nostalgic for my youth?" - maybe the Good Internet lives on in other forms: podcasts, substack, tiktok, slack & discord.